The latest edition of DBA Software now includes "make-to-order" jobs, which represent a major innovation that opens up possibilities for all kinds of companies that would never consider using a traditional manufacturing system. Quoting, job processing, shipping, and invoicing are all combined within the job itself. Jobs can be created from templates, bills of material, or previous jobs.

Make-to-order jobs can be used to produce, assemble, process, or manufacture almost any type of item or product. Make-to-order jobs are optimized for make-to-order environments, although they can also be used to make items for stock.

In today's fast-paced, service-oriented, just-in-time environment, most manufacturing and job shop software packages are outmoded for the needs of smaller companies. How many companies truly need complicated MRP-driven manufacturing software or the intense shop-floor tracking associated with job shop packages?

In fact, many companies - sign painters, assemblers, printers, machine builders, and many others - don't even consider themselves manufacturers and are not at all suited for traditional manufacturing software. Yet they do have operational requirements that can't be handled by general accounting software package.

If you are looking for an innovative alternative to traditional manufacturing and accounting software, make-to-order jobs are for you!

Major enhancements have been made to the DBA Ezijobz web site that will be helpful to anyone interested in an ERP solution for small and midsize enterprises. The web site has been reorganized so that product information is presented by functional application (accounting, sales, inventory, manufacturing, etc.) as well as by industry. Several hundred full-size screen shots have been added that will give you a good feel for the system's broad scope and functionality.

DBA Software's production planning capabilities have been expanded with a new series of MRP settings, including order policy, economic order quantity, order multiple, planning horizon, time bucket length, bucket start date, and safety stock. MRP can now be generated for a specified number of levels, including one at a time, if desired.

A crucial difference between DBA and many other MRP systems is the integration with scheduling. When planned orders are converted into jobs, they are automatically scheduled as they are created, whereas in most MRP systems only a standard lead time is used to establish start and finish dates. With DBA you can plan and schedule one level at a time and achieve higher planning accuracy, especially in the lower levels of the product structures.

A series of new costing capabilities have been added to DBA Software that gives businesses additional options in the areas of job and inventory costing.

"Cost elements" can now be assigned to resources and automatically add costs based on user-defined breakdowns and formulas as jobs are estimated, labor and services are reported, and manufacturing standard costs are rolled up.

A single cost element can be comprised of multiple costs such as labor, setup, fixed overhead, variable overhead, or almost any combination of cost variables. These multiple costs are allocated on a percentage basis and can be variable or a fixed dollar amount.

These cost elements allow for simple costing or highly sophisticated schemes such as activity-based costing where different types of job costs can be automatically allocated across a number of cost categories within a single transaction.

For manufacturers that use standard costing, DBA offers a complete standard costing capability where all costs are recorded at standard cost with variances automatically posted to GL variance accounts. You can perform "what if" cost rollups at any time, as well as a formal cost rollup that will set new fiscal standard costs and automatically revalue your inventory.